On the latest episode of Drink Champs, Ludacris reflected on burying the hatchet with T.I. following their early '00s beef.
"From my perspective, it was always a little subliminals and I just heard subliminals," Luda told host N.O.R.E. around the ten-minute point of the interview, as seen above. "I'm extremely competitive so I'm always with the subliminals. So... when he would jab I would jab right back in records." N.O.R.E. jokingly asked if these "jabs" happened "at the light skin karate class," to which Luda responded with a laugh. "Absolutely not," he said. "But no, just competition, man."
The beef between the two rappers kicked off after they appeared on Young Buck's track "Stomp" together, on which T.I. rapped, "Me gettin' beat down? / That's ludicrous." Buck perceived the line as a diss towards Luda, which prompted a subliminal back-and-forth between them over the years that followed. In 2007, however, T.I. got into a physical altercation with Luda's manager Chaka Zulu, which he later apologized for at the BET Awards.
"It's crazy because, again in retrospect, we were actually on a flight together on a plane," he continued. "We went to George Floyd's funeral services together. Will Packer put a bunch of people together on this plane, and so we literally were on there talking for two, three hours. [Talking about] everything, the whole history, and you know, I just told him to his face, like, 'Brother I never start any fucking thing. You know what I'm saying?' I come from a world where I mind my own fucking business, this is what Ludacris does."
While he prefers to mind his own business, he admitted that he will engage in some jabs if he hears anyone coming for him on record. "I hear people talk stuff and people take jabs and people take shots, and then I decide whether or not I want to send the shots back," he said. "But at the end of the day I just don't start shit. I finish it, that's what I do."
Luda said they reflected on their history together during the flight and at the end they couldn't help but laugh at the tension between them in the past. "That's what maturity and that's what growth is all about, but we gave people what they wanted for a certain amount of time and that's what hip-hop is," he added. "It starts from competition and we going to give you that."
The two rappers settled their differences in 2008 with the release of two collaborations, "On Top of the World" on T.I.'s album Paper Trail and "Wish You Would" on Luda's Theater of the Mind.
Watch the full episode of Drink Champs above.
